How indie hackers choose hosting?
Since 99.9% of the products here are purely online, we all have websites, services, apps, etc. to power. I wanted to start a discussion around how indie hackers choose hosting for their products. What are the things we struggle most with when it comes to hosting?
DigitalOcean and Vercel are good platforms
AWS (ec2+load balance) can solve most web service problems.
I think for people that self-fund their business, choosing a hosting platform that has a generous free tier is the way to go. For example, Vercel for hosting and Planetscale for database. Both have incredibly generous free tiers, so you’ll only pay once you actually start getting some traction.
Auth these days is pretty much Free Forever™, with most providers (GitHub, Google, Facebook, etc.) having made their auth solutions available to everyone.
I see that Digital Ocean is somehow dominant when it comes to launching fast and cheap
I went with what is cheap which is a dedicated server from Hetzner.
I think another thing to consider is familiarity. For a MVP use techstack stack that you know well, even if its not optimal. If the product gets traction you can always migrate to something new.
Yes, this is so true. Many people want to use new technologies with their new projects but this is a pitfall
We are using Cloudflare for our product Churnfree, and they are providing excellent service. But the digital ocean is also the best host.
We are running our static forms backend https://fabform.io on Digital Ocean and are happy with their hosting service.
I've found a decent stack that works well for me on hobby plans (low risk, low startup cost, can re-use boilderplate code).
That stack being PlanetScale, NextJs, Tailwind, Vercel, Supabase, and a few others. The key is to run at little to no cost so you can try a bunch of stuff.
For me there are two primary considerations:
I use whatever can get me running the fastest at the lowest (or no) cost. These days, that's been DigitalOcean and AWS because of their free credits and my familiarity with their platforms.
Is the price good when it comes to scalability?
Depends on your needs and what scale you are at. On free credits it doesn’t really matter.
I tend to learn on:
Honestly, this stack serves 99% of my needs. I rarely run into issues, but then again, I'm not serving millions of users.
I’m building my project soon. I’m very comfortable in React and going to use Next.js for my purpose as I will likely be heavily relying on SEO, amongst other reasons.
However I will need a basic sql db. I think there are ways of doing this now with vercel with certain extensions.
Would you recommend trying this or just use an external db from some other site or should I put the whole lot somewhere else?
It’s essentially a booking website I’m building.
For example have you ever used supabase combined with vercel? Is this a good combo?
Hey Dangow, great question.
Vercel now offers a serverless SQL solution that could be fun to explore, but it is very new, so I imagine there are some quirks.
Supabase + NextJS works perfectly alongside Vercel, and I highly recommend it. You can use Supabase's SDK to interact with your DB alongside NextJS server routes.
Perfect thanks for the detailed explanation :)